Merlot's Fast Ride to Stardom

Merlot is a red wine grape that is used as a blending grape and for varietal wines. Merlot-based wines typically have average body with trace of berry, plum, and currant. Its softness and stoutness, combined with its earlier ripening, makes Merlot a model grape to blend with the sterner, later-ripening Cabernet Sauvignon. This suppleness has helped to make it one of the most popular red wine varietals in the United States and Chile.

The most basic recorded mention of Merlot was in the remarks of a local Bordeaux official who in 1784 labeled wine made from the grape in the Libournais region as one of the area's best. The name comes from the French provincial patois word Merlot, meaning young blackbird. By the 19th century it was being frequently planted in the Médoc on the Left Bank of the Gironde. It was originally confirmed in Italy around Venice under the synonym Bordò in 1855. The grape was launched into the Swiss, sometime in the 19th century and was recorded in the Swiss canton of Ticino between 1905 and 1910. “Researchers at University of California, Davis believe that the grape is an offspring of Cabernet Franc and is a sibling of Carménère.”

After a sequence of delays that consist of a severe frost in 1956 and several vintages in the 1960s lost to rot, French authorities in Bordeaux banned new plantings of Merlot vines between 1970 and 1975. Until 1993, the Chilean wine industry incorrectly sold a large quantity of wine made from the Carmenere grape as Merlot. In that year, genetic studies exposed that much of what had been grown as Merlot was actually Carmenere. The classification of Chilean Merlot is a catch-all to include wine that is made from a blend of random amounts of Merlot and Carmenere. With Merlot ripening 3 weeks earlier than Carmenere, these wines vary significantly in eminence depending on harvesting.

Merlot grapes are identified by their loose bunches of large berries. The color has less of a blue/black shade than Cabernet Sauvignon grapes and with a thinner skin; the grapes also have less tannins. In addition to a contrast against Cabernet, a Merlot grape tends to have higher sugar content and lower malic acid. Merlot prospers in cold soil, mostly ferrous clay. The vines have a tendency to bud early which gives it some hazard to cold frost and its thin skin increases its vulnerability to rot. It normally ripens up to two weeks earlier than Cabernet Sauvignon. Water stress is important to the vine with it thriving in well drained soil more so than at base of a slope.

Merlot was popular, but then took a dip because of the movie sideways. Throughout the film, Miles addresses dotingly of the red wine varietal Pinot Noir. Following the film's U.S. release in October 2004, Merlot sales dropped 2% while Pinot Noir sales increased 16% in the Western United States. A related trend transpired in British wine outlets. Sales of Merlot plummeted after the film's release most likely due to Miles' disapproving remarks about the varietal in the film.